The evolution of technology often moves from business use to casual consumers’ daily lives, but social media tends to move in the opposite direction. Social networking is now becoming company policy, reports the New York Times, through internal social networks specific to the workplace. Microscope company Nikon Instruments and computer security company Symantec both have internal social networks, used by employees to handle company business—inter-office memos have entered the 21st century.

Yammer is a company that has developed internal social media applications for companies. It is like a “Facebook for business.” However Salesforce.com built a similar service called Chatter and they even bought a Super Bowl commercial for it. Interestingly Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff praised Yammer at the TechCrunch50 conference before launching Chatter. Check out the video above. [BusinessInsider]

Yammer, the micro-blogging service for enterprises, has raised $25 million in funding. The funding was led by U.S. Venture Partners. Emergence Capital, Charles River Ventures, and the Founders Fund had participated in this round. Yammer’s total funding is at $40 million. U.S. Ventures’ Mamoon Hamid will join the Yammer board of directors.

Google Buzz

Google is making GMail more interactive by integrating additional social media features into the service. Coined as Google Buzz, GMail will soon have the ability to share videos, photos, and websites with contacts within the e-mail service itself. Flickr and Twitter are both supported. [Google Blog]

Apple Aperture 3

Apple has upgraded Aperture to the 3rd version this morning. Aperture is a high-end photo editing software. New features include Faces, Places, and Brushes. [Apple.com]

LG GD800 Mini and GT350

LG has announced two new mobile devices: the LG GD880 Mini and the GT350. THe GD880 has a 3.2″ touchscreen, 5 megapixel cam, WiFi, AGPS, and 7.2Mbps HSDPA. The GT350 has a four line QWERTY sliding keyboard and a 3″ WQVA touchscreen. No details on pricing yet. The GD880 Mini will be available in Europe starting next month. [BGR]

Foursquare-Zagat Deal

Foursquare has announced a deal with Zagat. Foursquare will soon offer their users a “Foodie” badge that indicates how many times the user has rated restaurants on Zagat. [NYT]

Motorola Invests In TuneWiki

TuneWiki has raised $7 million in funding from several investors. This is TuneWiki’s second round of investment. Investors include Motorola Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Intellect Capital Ventures, HillsVen Capital LLC, and Novel TMT. [Globes Israel]

Flixster Raises $12.5 Million

Flixster was recently acquired by Rotten Tomatoes, but that hasn’t stopped the company from raising additional funding. According to a filing with the SEC, Flixster has raised $12.5 million. The investors were undisclosed. Flixster currently receives 30 million unique visitors per month. [VentureBeat]

Yammer Raises $10 Million

Yammer, the micro-blogging enterprise service has raised $10 million in funding as part of a Series B. Yammer has about 60,000 companies registered as their clients. “We said that we would use our Series B financing to bolster engineering, sales, and marketing,” stated Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks in a press release. [PRWeb]

Yammer is an instant messaging tool that promotes short frequent answers to questions within companies.  Yammer serves as a central location for co-workers to exchange ideas, post news, share links, ask questions, etc.  Anyone in a company can start a Yammer network and invite other colleagues.  The company was founded by David Sacks and won the top-prize at the TechCrunch50 conference.

Yammer spun off from Geni.com, another company that Sacks founded.  Geni.com raised $5 million in Series C earlier this week.  The companies involved with Yammer’s $5 million Series A investment were Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures.  The Founders Fund are a group of investors where many partners are formerly of PayPal.  David Sacks was COO of PayPal at one point.

What puts Yammer at risk is Twitter’s ability to launch a groups feature.  If Twitter creates an enterprise version of their service, they could take on Yammer head-on.

[via TechCrunch]